Etiquette – Page 4

Yahoo! security support sucks with a capital S

Posted on March 9, 2008March 9, 2008 by Sol Young with 4 Comments

Most of you know I rarely go out of my way to publicly voice such a negative opinion as I’m about to issue. Especially against a company for which: a) I hold stock, and b) I believe is one of the best large companies in Silicon Valley.

Today I signed up for Yahoo! Merchant Services for my father’s HeartsongStudios.com (a small time marimba making studio in Northern Cali). I’ve used Y!’s store system with partner sites at iofy, such as TheLanguageStop.com (a foreign language and ELT/ESL specialty store). I like Yahoo!’s store product and recommend it to others.

The signup process was a piece of cake. Zipped through the steps until the moment after my credit card was processed. At that point the added Security Key was requested. Since no security key had been initiated for the account, I was asked for information to generate a new one.

First question: “What is your name?” – duhhh…
Second question, “When is your birthday?” – better, but easily available on Facebook and elsewhere.
Third question: “What is your favorite city?” – I don’t remember, I’ll put in my hometown.

The third answer was wrong. I’ve had my Y! account almost as long as Y! has been in business. It’s probably a secret question I set a long time ago. Getting the third question wrong one time locked me out of merchant services and prompted to call Y!’s security team. Fine.

The wait time was minimal on the phone. As soon as a Y! human was on the line things went downhill. Here is an almost exact transcript of the conversation which took place. Names of people and places are replaced so you don’t get any ideas for h4c|<ing me, and so Y! doesn’t discipline the rep without learning more:

Posted in Etiquette, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo

Random House really going DRM-free

Posted on February 23, 2008 by Sol Young with 1 Comment

Yesterday I asked the question, “Random House DRM-free a hoax?“ The question was based on Cory Doctorow’s post announcing a big move by Random House towards DRM-free MP3 audiobooks. The PDF on his site links to a letter by Madeline McIntosh detailing the move to Random House’s partners.

Since my post both Cory and Madeline have confirmed the validity of the letter. Thank you to both for following up and answering the question.

Posted in Audiobooks, Blogging, Etiquette, Prediction

Jiffy Lube

Posted on February 2, 2008February 2, 2008 by Sol Young with Leave a comment

It used to be any male able to convey more knowledge than octane numbers to a Jiffy Lube salesman would avoid upselling. Not any more. I haven’t become such a geek I can’t hang with grease monkeys. Those tactics are sending me elsewhere… The dollar votes.

Posted in Etiquette

In the name of Twitternomics and style

Posted on January 27, 2008January 27, 2008 by Sol Young with 1 Comment

So I got to thinking the other day about all the peeps on Twitter who have slick, short, names. Most I follow on Twitter follow this convention (ev, al3x, jack, biz, dick, iofy, to name a few). It’s not just a status symbol on the service, but also a matter of resource utilization.

I switched from solyoung to sol. Easier to remember and less to type (special thanks to the Twitter guys for help with that.)

Each message on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. As of yet there isn’t a Twitter application which handles the @user feature. Thus, a response to a longer name both costs time and characters. Another Twitterer I follow (you should too, he’ll change your life) is braverydanger. That’s thirteen characters (or fifteen including the @ and a space.) A response to jack or iofy with the @user feature costs six total characters, allowing 6.7% more room for a response.

This becomes even more important on a mobile phone when typing the extra characters could cost an additional twenty or more seconds (assuming a typical numeric keypad w/out T9 input.)

The switch meant losing all my previous followers (name changes are bad news for brand recognition.) It also meant getting my tweets over to the new account. Both are worth it since I’m young in the game of blogging.

(note: Twitter’s API saved the day. To copy the tweets from the old account to the new account I screen-scraped the old posts and wrote a shell script that imported the scraped posts in reverse order with do/curl/while. Fifteen minutes of coding.)

Now… If only the guys at sol.com would let me pick up that domain for less than the quarter million they quoted last time ;)

Posted in Blogging, Etiquette, Twitter